Imagine if we taxed the enormous wealth of billionaires and used it for the good of many in society instead of inflating the ego of a single person. Our society is sick and I don't think people will stand for this level of inequality much longer.
World governments spent $35 trillion last year. That's annual spend. Why do people on the internet act like all of our social ails could be resolved if only we could tax Bezos and spend $35.01 trillion instead?
It's seems governments have a budgeting problem, not a funding problem.
Inequality is a strong psychological issue. No amount of correct math and logic can offset that. We're wired to despise those who have more than others, especially when others are struggling and especially when those who have show off.
You can point out objective things like that contemporary billionaires are nothing like super-rich monarchy or noblemen in the past, who literally didn't have to work one day of their lives and could dispose of people around them as they pleased, quite literally. There was no me too, no rape allegations, they just did whatever they pleased with minimal consequences.
You can point out all that, but it's irrelevant. Many humans just don't tolerate "rich entitled jerks who show off". Other humans don't tolerate other kind behaviours; humanity is clearly not a uniform bunch.
Even if we stole 10B from Bezos and gave it out equally to every US citizen... Its ~$30. Is this life changing for anybody in the US? If so what percent. Most beggars on the street clear more than $30 a day, some make $30 a hour!
So yeah, common core has failed us, and the inability to understand numbers is a problem.
I do this nearly every time somebody is upset somebody else has money. One time it was some Walmart executive. They got some multi million dollar bonus. I did the math, it would have been something like 2.27 a week more for all the employees.
Edit:
But yet we have folks still going around on twitter saying he could give everybody a million (some even a billion) and still have money left over.
> Even if we stole 10B from Bezos and gave it out equally to every US citizen... Its ~$30.
I mean, obviously it's gonna look small if we fixate on Bezos specifically. If we "stole" a flat $1B from every American billionaire and paid it out equally to every US citizen, that stimulus jumps up to $1,996.70. If we "stole" all the money from every billionaire, that'd jump up further to $12,569.61.
We can go further. The top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion. If we "stole" all of that, the resulting stimulus would be a comfy $102,842.28.
> I did the math, it would have been something like 2.27 a week more for all the employees.
$122.58/year could very well make a considerable difference to someone barely scraping by. And again, you're fixating on one Walmart executive; what about the other executives who likely received similar bonuses? VPs? Middle managers?
I understand what you're saying, but I don't see why it should be an excuse. After all, xenophobia and racism are natural human behaviours as well, (and not just human behaviour) but they shouldn't be tolerated, and we shouldn't promote policies that encourage them.
it's not an excuse; as with xenophobia and racism, these are phenomena which have to be understood and not dismissed. You cannot solve racism by just stating "races don't exist, here's the DNA evidence etc etc" perhaps implying that you're just an ignorant redneck if you don't understand science. Even if said science is solid, some people will not be moved by it because their bias doesn't stem from a misunderstanding of science (or math) but from somewhere deeper, and you don't have to excuse it in order to understanding and use that understanding to counter it.
Assuming the figure is well-sourced, and given the time since the spending occurred, I'd be interested to know where this $35 trillion has ended up (not necessarily just who it directly went to, but where it's parked now and how it got there).
I know that's a tall order, but I think governments should be accountable to how they've invested their citizen's money and how those investments are doing.
Also should be pointed out many countries greatly expanded their deficit as part of Covid measures.
I got the figure off of Wikipedia. They list every nation's government expenditures and the total sum is at the bottom of the table. $35.6 trillion. You're correct that covid stimulus had ballooned this figure, but even in "normal" years, it is still between $25 and $30 trillion which doesn't materially change the thrust of my argument.
I'm not even saying Bezos is appropriately taxed. I don't really care how high his tax bill is, but my main point is that the existence of world hunger and poverty isn't his fault even though many people online blame him for it, and secondly, taxing him at 100% wouldn't seem to solve the problem.
I agree w/everything you're saying. I'm questioning the ethics of raising taxes if the extra money gets mismanaged and ends up wasted or doubled back to the wealthiest individuals. The people who would be managing this money are the exact ones whose legislation has created this environment.
Raising the deficit and inflating the currency for blind and reckless cash give-aways (imo), only makes it worse and all the more reprehensible and should have everyone questioning why we're not overthrowing the existing parties by rallying around new ones and collectively agreeing to stop voting Dem or Rep altogether. Because if we traced the government (tax) money spent over the past year to where it is now, I bet we'd see it directly widening the wealth gap no matter the party or rhetoric used while misappropriating it.
Anyway, I think the real solutions (to hunger, education, healthcare, &c) would involve breaking down the issues causing the inequality and really working to solve them one by one in good faith with a common vision. Small groups of people can achieve this. It's unfortunate that the idea of that happening on the scale we're discussing is laughably absurd.
I don't think it's productive to talk about tax. Our economy should be designed in a way that workers capture a good proportion of their work. The problem at the moment is that when there are successful companies, a handful of investors and senior management capture practically all the gains. Amazon is an incredible company, and it's even more incredible that practically no one working at Amazon benefits from that.
Just letting that system persist and then hamfistedly grabbing the gains at the end and redistributing them is difficult for a huge number of reasons including both fairness and regulatory capture.
I think shared equity is one way of solving that problem, but if you look at other social democracies, regulatory regimes that favour workers and collective action can have similar effects.
People complain about the the many ways Amazon is crossing moral lines. Instead of asking to tax rich people, how about fixing the inadequacies of the government so that Amazon can't transgress moral lines as often and make as much profit?
Saying "tax the rich" as a fix to a problem shows a lack of critical thought.
>I don't think people will stand for this level of inequality much longer.
At the moment it seems like every government in the world is being held hostage by the obscenely rich, while workers with multiple jobs are struggling to even afford rent.
Please give me some hope and tell me how the change might come about? What signs have you seen out there that things are changing?
Because everything I see is just more and more wealth inequality, expanding year over year. Meanwhile the media, also in the obscenely rich's pocket, reports on these billionaire space assholes as if they've achieved something worthwhile, which is sickening to me.
If you honestly don't like it though you should stop using their services, otherwise the message you are sending is that you care, but not really that much.
I know I'm in the minority, but I stopped shopping with Amazon long ago, closed my audible account, and have slowly been migrating my current workplace off our/their AWS infrastructure.
A handful of people have mentioned this is too much of a hardline stance, but personally I think it's important to take some actions if you truly want to see change in the world.
I really don't understand why people have such a hard time weening themselves off Amazon products.
It's not even like a physical constraint like having to drive a little further to a different store. Just visit a different website it's the bare minimum of effort needed.
It amazes me how Best Buy, Staples and other physical retailers refuse to compete.
For instance you can't buy a quality headset from Plantronics or get a USB NFC reader from either of those firms. Best Buy will sell you a Sony Alpha 7 camera but forget about any lenses other than the kit lens.
Don't get me started about how Dick's Sporting Goods sells mostly men's athletic shirts that will show your nipples which would be fine if I wore a bra but I don't know many men that do. I asked the people there, "Do you want to sell any clothes or do you want to make excuses for why you aren't selling any?"
> I asked the people there, "Do you want to sell any clothes or do you want to make excuses for why you aren't selling any?"
They probably just want to be left alone. They get shipped the stuff someone higher in the chain of command ordered. Why are you bothering the sales staff with things outside their control?
Funny I wrote wegmans supermarket asking if a product packed in type 7 plastic could be packed in 1, 2, or 5 (recyclable) and got a nice reply in 30 min.
Does Amazon really care what answers people give? Would dicks sporting goods? Wegmans at least wants to look as if they care.
Planet fitness once told the NYT that they’d never gotten customer feedback on an issue but they make it so hard to find the form that they obviously don’t want you to use it.
Here's what I learned when I cancelled mine: when you cancel, you will still have full use of Prime benefits for the time remaining until the subscription runs out. So if you really want to cancel, there's no reason not to just do it now. You'll still be able to use Prime until April regardless.
> If you honestly don't like it though you should stop using their services
Agreed. That's what I did.
What I found amusing is that when I cancelled the services, Amazon (unlike pretty much every other company) didn't ask me to tell them why. It seems that they want to know everything about everybody -- except for why someone would want out.
Big successes do not erase equally big failures. And the failure here, not on Amazon alone, is far too many Americans not earning enough from their labor the fund continuing to exist reasonably and show up to work.
> The real shame is that, as Bezos pointed out, hundreds of people worked incredibly hard to design, test, and operate the New Shepard rocket booster and space capsule. Blue Origin has refused multiple requests to interview these engineers and let them share the challenges they surmounted to create this vehicle; no executives joined the crew for a post-flight press conference.
SpaceX very much branded its initial launches as "we are what NASA should have been." Countless appearances and interviews with people who were very clearly "engineers' engineers" excited out of their minds to be working on the project. It was clear that there was overflowing passion given a very "shiny" space to dream, and that was the guiding light. You could disagree with Elon Musk and still admire his ability to build, inspire, and fund such a team. You could see the light in their eyes and want to contribute like them some day.
Blue Origin was very much starting from a disadvantage, not being the first private-industry movers. But - and I think this is critical - they also made an unforced error by insulating the public from the passion their engineers undoubtedly have. It makes it very much the Jeff Bezos Show, which makes the whole venture much more susceptible to public opinion about Bezos personally. His tone-deaf remarks on customers "paying" for the venture dug that hole even deeper.
Setting aside emotion, whoever paves the way for space exploration in the coming decade needs to inspire. I'm going to root for the team that understands what it means to inspire. And that makes it impossible for me to root for Blue Origin.
I’m personally rather bored with the hobbies and tastes of these modern tech billionaires like Jeff and Elon. A few years back, there was a total global circumnavigation of the world in a solar powered 2 person airplane based in Switzerland, I forget the project name. This thing did not have to land to charge batteries but could stay aloft indefinitely, albeit at a very floppy wing surface area to weight ratio, and the resulting vulnerability to wind and low speed. Such a project or something that presents and actual investment that only a billionaire could provide are eschewed in favor of juvenile pissing contests like Mr. Branson and Mr. Bezos pursue
SpaceX is a profitable business, especially with StarLink. They essentially got rival satellite operators to buy the rockets they then re-use to launch their payloads. And they managed to underbid everyone in the space launch business for government contracts (Even factoring in R&D costs the Dragon is incredibly cheap).
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are just hobbies for the rich, but SpaceX might bring real benefits to "average joes" (just like the GPS system did).
> SpaceX is a profitable business, especially with StarLink.
Starlink isn't profitable yet, and won't be for several more years.
Parts of their business are definitely profitable today, for example the Falcon 9 launch business. Other parts of their business are being pursued in the hope of future profits, but those future profits are some years away.
>juvenile pissing contests like Mr. Branson and Mr. Bezos pursue
This is really all it is, it's rich guys performing for other rich guys while the rest of us fight for scraps. It's sickening to me that so many people defend the honor of rich CEOs like Bezos, Branson, Musk, Gates, etc because they truly think that more money = better than.
Musk might be a weirdo, but SpaceX as a whole is not smoke and mirrors. Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules are a tested, reliable technology developed for reasonable money. When in doubt, compare their development budgets, timetables and flight record to those of the Space Launch System.
I get to watch the guy who killed book stores ride a giant dick into space."
https://ibb.co/t2tcN3p